![]() The animals wander, free-range, throughout the winter eating from the natural environment, dining on lichens when the food starts getting scarce, and then returning to the herders when the herders lay out hay bales. When we stayed at Aurora Holidays, owner Tiina Salonen, whose husband is a Sami reindeer herdsman, explained the practice. In Finland, these herders have vast areas of wilderness divided into zones, and their herds are allowed to wander freely throughout. But indeed reindeer is a common dinner item, and in Lapland, the Sami people still make a living reindeer herding – although their former nomadic life faded away over the generations with the establishment of international borders. On the one hand, reindeer actually existed? Cool! On the other hand, blood in a pancake didn’t sound too appetizing. At one point they had eaten reindeer-blood pancakes. I remember as a child when my grandmother returned from Finland with stories. You can get farm-raised elk burgers in Wisconsin (the elk population is still too small to be hunted), but no moose is on the menu yet – though they make the occasional appearance up north - or even not that far north. What Americans call an elk is just a big species of deer to them. I had no idea the animal existed outside of Canada and the northern fringes of the United States. So what gives? I googled and it turns out that what North Americans refer to as a moose is called an elk in Europe. We have elk in Wisconsin, and I had no doubt about what I saw. I asked Irene if they had moose and she said no, that was an elk crossing sign. The silhouette was unmistakably a moose to my eyes. Later on in our journey, as Irene drove us farther north into the Arctic Circle we passed an animal-crossing sign. The cured elk we had at her house tasted almost like ham and had a similar tenderness and texture. ![]() Irene keeps hunting dogs and they venture out into the wild annually to restock on elk meat. While Kuusamo often considers itself Lapland, it is not quite, and as Irene drove us north we soon crossed the Arctic Circle. Irene lives in a small village 120 miles north of Kuusamo. (Actually, I noticed a typo on that old certificate that added a year to my age, so my DNR Hunter Safety Certificate was inadvertently my first and only fake ID.) I grew up with abundant venison in the freezer and while I never got into hunting, I took a hunter safety course when I was 12 which would allow me to hunt without supervision when I was 14. In Wisconsin, deer hunting season is practically a state holiday and a few of the more rural schools even close for that week as a “fall holiday” knowing attendance would likely be low anyway. Irene and her husband – I knew from past emails, and soon from sitting at their dining table in their home in Lapland inside the Arctic Circle – were elk hunters. Like Wisconsin, Finland also enjoys meat from outside the usual beef/pork/chicken sphere. Between dining out and eating in we enjoyed a great snapshot of the Finnish table during our Finland trip. My cousin Irene warned me: “We are a meat and potatoes culture.” I assured her: so is Wisconsin. So the entire trip was a series of little surprises. But other than some juustoleipä – Finnish “squeaky cheese” – which I found being made in Wisconsin, I really had no ideas about Finnish cuisine. They picked up the habit from Norwegians in northern Wisconsin or Upper Peninsula Michigan, I suppose. But the jellified lye-soaked cod dish is not traditionally Finnish. My Finnish-American grandmother was very fond of lutefisk as was her mother before her.
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